The second generation of multimedia is here

If you've got any involvement in e-learning, take a look at the British Film Institute's latest project. It's an online guide to the work of Ealing Studios, introduced and narrated by Jonathan Ross, and the interesting thing is that it's...

For the BFI, it's part of its mission to provide wider access to the greatest archive of moving film in the world. It can't digitise it all - there's just too much, and anyway it doesn't have the rights to all of it. But it can take excerpts and try to make them interesting to everyone from film buffs to the MTV generation.

The Ealing Studios project was developed in association with BT, whose senior interactive filmmaker Martin Percy says that the key was to merge the film footage and the interactivity - the linking clips of Jonathan Ross, including clips of him telling dilatory users to hurry up.

"The interactivity has to fundamentally change what you're getting out," Percy adds. "If you could view the footage and make sense of it without the interactivity, I've failed."

In this case, it started with the BFI's expert writing what he wanted to say about Ealing Studios - that it produced much more than just the famous Ealing comedies, for instance.

"I interactivate that and plot routes through it, and then we write a script with that in mind," Percy says.

He's also worked on a similar project for BT staff, explaining that company's business transformation plans, and says that the non-linear approach is particularly useful where you have a lot of people with contrasting views or with differing levels of knowledge.

And he says that the biggest block to this new generation of interactive multimedia is that it requires creative types who also have technical knowledge.

"But lots of them still treat technology as being for geeks," he adds. "That's why they can't create anything new."